Yes, I realize that it is August and my blog title is lyrics from
a holiday song.
What can I say? I am in the mood.
September is only a few days away, which
means that October and "holiday season" are only 5 weeks away.
October-December is
my favorite time of year. I love Halloween. Thanksgiving is usually pretty good
and of course there is the yuletide season.
When I was in grad school (the first time)
I wrote a thesis on secular Christmas music. A few years ago I put together a
podcast of Christmas tunes and put on a Christmas show. I am not sure what I
want to do this year, but I have to think of something.
I was inspired today, because I came
across "Halloween Nuggets." It is a box set of Halloween ditties from
the 1950s and 1960s. The art on the cover is very pulp fiction and the tunes
are "garage" in their composition structure and sound. Though I don't
really have the desire to compose Halloween tunes, I am interested in their
history. Much like the Christmas tunes I wrote about in my thesis, many came
out of the area of novelty songs (1910s-1930s), but failed in that they are not
revered every year, nor did it spawn a gold rush of Christmas hits in the 1940s
through the early years of rock and roll. Christmas' desire for the
sublime of yesteryear was manufactured by the Knickerbockers in 1800s New York
area to curb wassailing and make the holiday family friendly.
With this cleansing of the holiday,
nostalgia was built into the mystic of Santa and all things NOT Jesus related
and our modern day secular Christmas started to take shape. By World War I,
Christmas was becoming an industry and by the end of World War II, Christmas
was the United States' holiday.
Today Christmas is a powerhouse.
I mean Hallmark has like 200 movies in the
can about the holiday.
They are all great too. Women in
relationship with a dud, either happens upon a mysterious stranger (with a heart
of gold), or rekindles with an old flame. This takes place where it snows at
Christmas time and her parents always have some kind of connection to the
stranger or old flame. In one movie I saw the loner "cowboy" guy is
really into whittling or putting those ships in the bottles just like the
woman's dad and they bond. Ccccraaappp.
I watch these movies every year.
And don't even get me started on Christmas
traditions.
Anyway, what I was actually going to write
about is that Halloween might be coming into its own as a holiday with the
nostalgia train. Except unlike Christmas, it paid its dues as a holiday and now
is a valid mainstay, which people/families have their own traditions associated
with the ghoulish season.
Halloween is a mish-mash of Celtic, All Soul’s Day, All Hallows
Eve, and a few other days that center on the celebration of the dead. In the
late 1800s, there was an effort to curb Halloween’s “trick or treating,” which
was similar to wassailing at the time and make it more community friendly. The
holiday went through an ebb and flow until the 1950s and the baby boom, where
the holiday became a child focused holiday.
As a Gen X’er, I have a certain nostalgic ping in my heart for
Halloween. Growing up with more autonomy then kids today, we trick or treated
huge geographic parameters and used pillow cases to hold our loot. There was an
excitement of being out at night, dressed up as someone (or thing) else, and
going to strangers doors to receive a treat that can I cannot explain.
Later, as a punk rocker I enjoyed (still do) the ghoulish tunes of
the Cramps, Alien Sex Fiend, Specimen, and other goth rockers who seemed to live
in a loop of Halloween and had a macabre group think that was celebrated with
not only images of the grotesque and German expressionist poetry and art, but
also an appreciation of seeing beauty through a different lens.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the cutesy Halloween stuff too.
With my daughter now at an age where she will enjoy the candy part
of Halloween, it pleases me that she is into picking out what she wants to be
for the holiday.
Does it warm my heart that she wants to be Sally from “Nightmare
Before Christmas?” Yes.
I hope that the music of Halloween will one day be recognized to
its full potential.
Witch Girl by the Mystrys
Graveyard by the Phantom Five
Burn the Flames by Roky Erickson
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